Instructor Profile: Carellin Brooks – WMST 224C

WMST 224C: Women in Literature is a six-credit distance education course. Carellin Brooks has been teaching WMST 224C since 2003 and recently shared some of her experiences teaching the course.

Having experience as both an instructor and a student in the online setting, Carellin is well aware of some of the rewards and challenges of taking an online course. She notes, “I think that online learning really allows you ultimate flexibility.” With that in mind, Carellin finds that students often send her emails or post discussion topics at all hours of the day, completing the course work around their schedules. She has had students studying in different provinces and countries, and others with challenging family and life circumstances that would prevent them from attending an on-campus course. For Carellin, she finds this very gratifying and thinks that “it’s wonderful that they can still manage to fit a course in.”

Carellin has also been able to benefit from the flexibility of teaching via distance. As a parent, she finds it “great to be able to work from home on occasion.” She was also able to communicate with her supervisor completely online, while completing her Doctorate. In fact, the first time she met her supervisor in person was the same week that she had to do her viva, the British equivalent of a defence for her PhD.

Carellin has found that her course brings a really diverse group of students together. She notes that “a lot of times [students are] fulfilling their Arts literature requirement, so they might come from a slightly different discipline or area.” For many students, Carellin finds that “this is really their first encounter with a lot of these ideas, with reading a text critically, with looking at the political meaning behind the text. For some students it’s really quite enjoyable to be able to examine these questions for maybe the first time.” Carellin also notes that students find Women’s Studies to be relevant to their lives. “That would be why I started both learning in the discipline and teaching in the discipline, was that I think it’s extremely relevant, I think it’s extremely interesting, and it certainly had the power, for me, to be very transformative, and it continues to have that power today.”